Note 119b — HILARION

This story—whatever belief we may give to its details—is one of many which make it tolerably certain that a large snake (Python) still lingered in Eastern Europe. Huge tame snakes were kept as sacred by the Macedonian women; and one of them (according to Lucian) Peregrinus Proteus, the Cagliostro of his time, fitted with a linen mask, and made it personate the god Æsculapius. In the “Historia Lausiaca,” cap. lii. is an account by an eye-witness of a large snake in the Thebaid, whose track was “as if a beam had been dragged along the sand.” It terrifies the Syrian monks: but the Egyptian monk sets to work to kill it, saying that he had seen much larger—even up to fifteen cubits.